I remember reading on this board that other people have encountered macrobiotic dieters so I think they will know where I coming from. I started exploring the alternative health world when I was a teenager. This was before the internet so I talked with the kind of people who lounged in the cafes of old fashioned health food stores and who went to seminars on macrobiotic diets.

I remember many different types of people into alternative health being very sober in warning me about "night shades" ( vegetables that grew underground, or under the shade of leaves and vines ), particularly tomatoes as they were "poisonous".

I can't tell anyone how many millions of pounds of "night shades" I have eaten since my teen years or how many millions of gallons of tomato sauce based foods I've had. Not to mention how much billions of people over the centuries have had.

I see soy beans as "the modern nightshade". People who like to tell stories, love to give sober warnings about eating soy beans. Even aside from protein, soy beans are an extremely cheap source of many nutrients, including calcium,iron and essential fatty acids. Soy beans also make very nice faux meat and faux dairy substitutes.In other words they threaten one of the most well monied industries aside from oil. Given that, I don't expect to ever see an end to the anti-soy hysteria in my lifetime.

However, I found this interesting article which debunks a lot of common myths about eating soy beans that is currently making the "night shade circuit" on the internet.

Jack Norris R.D. ( Registered Dietitian ) wrote a response to the 2010 December 09 article written by Kristin Wartman of the “Civil Eats” blog entitled “Not Soy Fast”. Kristin Wartman’s blog site gives this introduction about her:

Kristin is a food writer living in Brooklyn. She has a Masters in Literature from UC Santa Cruz and is a Certified Nutrition Educator. She is interested in the intersections of food, health, politics, and culture.

That kind of weak set of credentials I've seen often with articles making *extreme* anti-soy claims.

Jack Norris reviewed 130 papers over the course of 3 months in preparing his response to Wartman’s article. The editors of the “Civil Eats” blog decided not to publish it, but you can read that response here

Last edited by Jhana4 on Fri Apr 08, 2011 11:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

In reading the scriptures, there are two kinds of mistakes:One mistake is to cling to the literal text and miss the inner principles.The second mistake is to recognize the principles but not apply them to your own mind, so that you waste time and just make them into causes of entanglement.

No need to be overly anxious about one's body in the context of nutrition. It is deteriorating anyway.

a monk reflects on this very body from the soles of the feet on up, from the crown of the head on down, surrounded by skin and full of various kinds of unclean things: 'In this body there are head hairs, body hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, tendons, bones, bone marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, pleura, spleen, lungs, large intestines, small intestines, gorge, feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, skin-oil, saliva, mucus, fluid in the joints, urine.'

"Furthermore, as if he were to see a corpse cast away in a charnel ground — one day, two days, three days dead — bloated, livid, & festering, ... picked at by crows, vultures, & hawks, by dogs, hyenas, & various other creatures... a skeleton smeared with flesh & blood, connected with tendons... a fleshless skeleton smeared with blood, connected with tendons... a skeleton without flesh or blood, connected with tendons... bones detached from their tendons, scattered in all directions — here a hand bone, there a foot bone, here a shin bone, there a thigh bone, here a hip bone, there a back bone, here a rib, there a breast bone, here a shoulder bone, there a neck bone, here a jaw bone, there a tooth, here a skull... the bones whitened, somewhat like the color of shells... piled up, more than a year old... decomposed into a powder: He applies it to this very body, 'This body, too: Such is its nature, such is its future, such its unavoidable fate.'

Greetings Jhana4,If memory serves me well, the reason one doesn't eat soybeans is that they take a god-awful long time to cook, as bland as can be and because they tend to give one a tummy ache. Having cooked soybeans once to make tofu many years ago, I'm more inclined to purchase tofu (and tempeh) ready made.Some years ago I also had a doctor tell me that the then, current popular wisdom of 'phyto-oestrogens' and their detrimental effect on human health via eating soy-products, was a load of hokum.As for night-shades - like you, I've eaten millions of tomatos and potatos since my macro-neurotic days.

“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.” - Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Learn this from the waters:in mountain clefts and chasms,loud gush the streamlets,but great rivers flow silently.- Sutta Nipata 3.725

Ben wrote:Greetings Jhana4,If memory serves me well, the reason one doesn't eat soybeans is that they take a god-awful long time to cook, as bland as can be and because they tend to give one a tummy ache.

I thought that for 30 years too, until I tried doing it in a pressure cooker. 25 minutes. I found them to be easier to digest than other beans since they have far less carbs, which include the hard to digest sugars that beans are famous for. Yes, they are plain, but I would never eat just a plain plate of any beans. I find soy beans make a nice substitute for white bean dishes with heave flavors.......like curried white beans and apples.

Some years ago I also had a doctor tell me that the then, current popular wisdom of 'phyto-oestrogens' and their detrimental effect on human health via eating soy-products, was a load of hokum.

That was a rare good fortune. The soy industry and the animal ag industry have a lot of money, and they are increasingly competing with each other, so I think we will see misinformation they pay for, probably for the rest of our lives.

I meant "soy" in general with my post, not just soy beans. I like to use the term "soy beans" to remind people that "soy" isn't a class of food itself, but is just a bean like any other.

In reading the scriptures, there are two kinds of mistakes:One mistake is to cling to the literal text and miss the inner principles.The second mistake is to recognize the principles but not apply them to your own mind, so that you waste time and just make them into causes of entanglement.

alan wrote:Has it ever occurred to you that there is a vast industry in the American heartland getting huge tax breaks to produce useless soybeans?

Hi Alan. Yes, I read up on these issues, thanks for politely asking. The huge amounts of grain and soy beans produced in American agriculture........and subsidized with federal tax money go for livestock feed. This situation started in the 1970s when Americans complained to Richard Nixon that meat prices were too high. Nixon's secretary of agriculture Earl Butz started those programs to get feed costs down, which in turn reduced the cost of meat. Without those federal subsidies most animal products would not be affordable to many Americans.

I don't have figures for soy beans, but I know that it takes about 12 pounds of grain, like wheat or corn, to produce 1 pound of beef. Similar ratios exist for soy. The upshot is that the huge amounts of soy and grains grown could be reduced to a fraction of a percent if the land was used to feed people instead of feeding animals people eat.

In reading the scriptures, there are two kinds of mistakes:One mistake is to cling to the literal text and miss the inner principles.The second mistake is to recognize the principles but not apply them to your own mind, so that you waste time and just make them into causes of entanglement.